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Having fun with words by making a word cloud

I had fun making a wordle yesterday. No, that’s not a typo. 🙂 A wordle is a picture of a group of words – most often called a word cloud. Making a word cloud is good activity to do when you need to take a break from writing, but still want to get something accomplished on your story.

It can be used as a marketing tool. You can design one in photoshop or illustrator like the logo for the Meso Foundation’s 2011 conference:

It can be used as a way to check your keywords on your website. You can go to www.wordle.net and enter any website address that has a feed and it will automatically create a word cloud for you. Here’s what a wordle from the Writer’s Digest looks like:

It’s also a great way to see what your common words are in your story, or you can enter a grouping of words to make your own. Here’s the one I made as an example. It’s about the Missouri Writers’ Guild:

To control the size of the words, just enter them multiple times. So the large words, I wrote 10-15 times. The medium sized words I wrote 5-8 times. The small words I wrote about 3 times, and the tiny words I entered once.